User, Interrupted
Artwork by Pawel Kuczynski
On the first day of the only UX class I took in college, the professor opened with a line that had me intrigued.
“Life is a user experience,” she said.
What appears to be a basic metaphor is a precise description of how we move through the world. Every object, system, and interface we encounter is either supporting or interrupting our ability to navigate life as it unfolds. When something is well designed, it disappears, slipping right by our consciousness. When the design is bad, it produces discomfort and annoyance, sometimes leading to irrational emotional reactions. This is especially pronounced in digital environments because in physical space, a poorly designed tool might frustrate you, but there are other options. Digital tools present no alternative. The interface is the path, and when that path becomes a maze, the user is disoriented. Control weakens, they lose focus, and what could have been a simple action turns into unnecessary cognitive labor.
This is why small interface patterns carry disproportionate emotional weight.
The moment a website loads and immediately presents a “Subscribe for 15% off” prompt or an “Accept Cookies” banner, the user is pulled out of their original intention and into someone else’s invasive agenda. These prompts appear before any relationship has been established, which negatively impacts user trust, according to every single UX ethics lab on the planet. The system asks for something before it has given anything, which is bad hospitality. This marketing strategy is technically counterproductive because every time a user visits their inbox and sees excessive promotional content from some brand they randomly shared their email with that one time, the abundance of garbage reinforces their increasingly negative opinion of the brand, not to mention that the brands using these strategies seem to be unaware that when the user encounters anything preventing them from visiting a site, they leave. However, the approach is obviously effective with enough clients for brands to continue using it, otherwise it would have already been eliminated by its own performance data.
What is framed as strategy can, in practice, become a breach of natural sequence. Instead of guiding the user through an intuitive environment, a hungry platform consumes them, an insidious process that can, over time, alter neural pathways. If life is a user experience, then design choices that support cognitive health must be treated as a priority as we move forward. I am composing a long letter on this topic for Meta that will almost certainly not be read, but, like writing to a senator, there is nothing to lose.
